Fall comes to the Fairbanks hills

The further north you travel, the earlier autumn arrives ... and the shorter the time it stays! Fall in Alaska is a ripple which begins in the Arctic and heads south, and in any one place it only touches down for a few days before the leaves fall and winter seems to be knocking at the door. In the hills around Fairbanks -- the location of this shot -- you can be sure you've wandered into an enchanted forest. The whole world seems to have turned gold ... but it doesn't last. You seize the opportunity and shoot ten or twenty rolls of film, fast as you can! This picture is a scan from a print made in 1999. The camera was a Pentax K-1000; the lens was probably the Tamron 80-200mm zoom. The film stock would have been Kodak Royal Gold. It was scanned at 600dpi not long ago, and enhanced in Irfanview. (My best work from the era was done on transparency ... difficult to scan on the desktop, even if I had access to the slides, which I don't. Alas, they're in storage.) Photo by Mel, 1999.